The First Step
by Gamebird
Summary: Set between seasons 3 and 4, Sandra Bennet contemplates the reasons she wants a divorce from Noah as she sits in her car, trying to bring herself to go talk to an attorney.


**Title: **The First Step  
><strong>Characters: <strong>Sandra Bennet  
><strong>Rating: <strong>PG-13  
><strong>Warnings: <strong>Reference to past violence and abuse of mental powers  
><strong>Word count: <strong>~1,300  
><strong>Setting: <strong>Between Season 3 and 4  
><strong>Summary: <strong>Sandra works herself up to seeing an attorney about her troubled marriage.  
><strong>Notes: <strong>Written for heroes_faves 2011 Missing Scenes Ficathon. 

Sandra Bennet sat in her soccer-mom minivan and stared up through the sharply-angled windshield at the twelve story building of dull yellow brick that stood before her. Her hands twisted slowly and tightly around the steering wheel as her heart hammered too loud and too fast in her chest. _Can I do this? Should I do this? I have to do this, right? For me? It's time, isn't it? To do something for me?_ Inside that mundane, inoffensive-looking building was the divorce attorney she'd picked out after hours of agonizing, as if the choice of the particular lawyer made much of a difference. It was like imagining the identity of the executioner made the death into something other than dying.

_Do I really want to do this?_ She'd be throwing away nearly two decades of her life, claiming it was a failure, closing the book on that story and not with a 'happily ever after', either. She'd be confessing to a mistake, a terrible, tragic mistake that she had made not once, but day after day for **years**. She'd be telling all the world that her judgment sucked, that she was fickle, that she couldn't work it out, couldn't stick it out for the long haul, she was weak, she was stupid, and that no matter how fair she tried to be in the settlement, she knew she would be tarred as vindictive. All the abuse she'd heard friends and relatives and seen on TV directed towards evil women who left their men in their time of need, or by surprise during a period of calm, or after refusing to work with her husband on reconciliation - whenever - it swirled through her brain and settled around her like a disgusting second skin she couldn't shed. It didn't matter when the wife left, because there was **never** a good time for a woman to divorce a man.

Oh, exceptions might be made if he was cheating on her, or had hit her, or had a horrible addiction, or was squandering the family fortune, but although some of her virtue might remain intact if she sought divorce under those conditions (and none of them were true in Noah's case - the things that **were** true she couldn't speak of and be believed), she would remain stained by her stupidity in not foreseeing the circumstances. Sandra knew how it was for women - you were a slut if you put out and a frigid bitch if you didn't. There was no winning in dating and there was no winning in divorce, either.

Her shoulders sagged as her ears rang with the imagined responses of her children to the news: _Why are you getting a divorce? What happened? What did Dad do to deserve this? What did __**we**__ do to deserve it? Can't you just … you know, __**not**__ get divorced? Couldn't you wait? Why now? He's hardly around anymore anyway! _Her breath hitched unevenly. After this last incident when Noah had attacked her at the motel, and the humiliation of having Lyle call in the middle of it, having to cover up that Noah had a gun to her head … "I don't have to live this way," she whispered to herself. _I shouldn't have to live this way. I won't live this way. Right?_

He hadn't cheated (that she knew of). He hadn't hit her (that she knew of). He didn't have a horrible addiction (that she knew of). And … actually she had no idea how much money he had where. He had had a respectable salary as a paper salesman, but since the lid had been blown off his secret identity, Noah had simply shown up from time to time with paper boxes full of money like it was reams of stationary.

All the holes in her memory ate away at her in the lonely nights. She'd tried to hold the family together, but Claire was off in college and Lyle, her sweet boy Lyle, talked back to her and wouldn't do as she asked. He was only following Noah's example when he went out with friends and didn't call to let her know where he was or when he'd be back. She was undermined at every turn. She couldn't even be a good mother anymore.

"I shouldn't have to live this way," she said, her voice firmer. Too many nights all alone in the house spent worrying about her family - where was Noah? Was he alive or dead? Where was Lyle? Was he in trouble? Where was Claire? Was she okay? Sandra didn't want to be calling them all the time. She wanted to be strong and be there for them without clinging. But she'd been reduced to a landing pad and was given all the respect of a doormat.

She'd tried to get involved in Noah's separate life, because as long as she was with him, as long as Claire was her daughter, it was going to be her life as well. They'd had one traumatic event after another - held hostage, home burned down, on the run from the authorities, living a double life, shielding strangers from the government, hiding her daughter, weathering her daughter being assaulted in their own house! Sandra sniffled at that particular memory. Claire had said little about the brutal attack, didn't want to talk, but the amount of blood in the living room was ridiculous. Knives, broken furniture, a trail of destruction attested to how hard her diminutive daughter must have fought the monster who came for her and who ultimately got what he lusted after.

And that was only what Sandra could remember. Those gaps in her mind, sucking at her soul like the vacuum of space … any other, previous events Noah had taken from her and obviously there had been many events for him to take. He'd lied. Over and over, he'd lied. He'd lied like lying was the horrible addiction that he couldn't shake, no matter what. She'd said she'd stay at the hotel until he found Claire, only to find that he'd lost himself in the lie. He was caught up in a fantasy (or perhaps a reality, she conceded the possibility after all she'd seen) that she was a shape shifter out to get him. There was a disease or a disorder like that. She'd seen it on one of the daytime soaps. It was called Capgras delusion - the belief that someone you love has been replaced by an impostor.

Noah was the impostor, though. The sweet, endearing, funny and adorable paper salesman she'd married had been replaced by an evil, insensitive, deadly serious and borderline abusive assassin. That he had abducted children and facilitated experiments on them wasn't in question. That he was a murderer seemed almost guaranteed. She'd allied herself with a monster no better than that which had come for Claire - the very one who had suggested divorce. In the final accounting, would she rather be seen as the woman who had stood by Noah even knowing what he was, or the woman who left him when she found out just how far he had already gone?

"I won't live this way," she said, her voice level and still. Her hands dropped from the steering wheel. Clutching her purse in one hand and the door handle in the other, she took a deep, steadying breath and stepped out. The first step was always the hardest.


End file.
